


042 "young engineer"

by wheel_pen



Series: Iron Man AU [42]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fish out of Water, Kid Tony, My Pepper is different, Pre-Iron Man, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-12
Updated: 2013-04-12
Packaged: 2017-12-08 07:34:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/758768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Young Tony’s been injured after jumping off the school roof to test a pair of wings he made in art class. With his parents out of the country, it’s up to Obadiah to tend to him in his hands-off way, and to try and harness the intelligence and energy already on display. “Probably when I’m really old, like twenty, I’ll be all out of ideas, and then I’ll just play all the time.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	042 "young engineer"

**Author's Note:**

> 1) My Pepper is very different from canon Pepper. Her personality/origin is very different; to separate her from canon Pepper I've given her a new last name and a different hair color.
> 
> 2) The bad words are censored. That's just how I do things.
> 
> 3) Stories are numbered in the order I wrote them, which isn't necessarily the order in which they occur. The timeline is Chapter 2 of story 031 “wet.”
> 
> I wrote this series after the first Iron Man movie came out. It's very AU but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play with these characters.

I was cold and scared. Things kind of hurt, too, but being cold and scared was worse. The lights were very bright and there were a lot of people rushing busily around, no one I knew though. Was it better or worse that they weren’t really paying attention to me? I decided worse, so I made some noise.

“Mommy! Where’s my mommy?! I want my mommy!”

I had a very good howl. Daddy called it a ‘track-stopper.’ I had a lot of practice with it. Sure enough, a lady in a colorful outfit with a stethoscope stopped in her tracks and hurried over to me.

“It’s okay, honey,” she said soothingly. “I’m sure your mommy will be here soon. You just lie back, okay?”

“No, she won’t,” said a familiar voice—dark and hard and kind of smoky, but familiar nonetheless in a sea of confusion. “Mommy’s in Switzerland.”

The lady looked slightly startled by his sudden appearance and positively peeved when he indicated she was dismissed. But she was after all an outsider, a stranger, and Mommy always said to be careful of strangers.

“Obie! Where’s Mommy? I want Mommy!”

“Calm down,” Obadiah instructed. His voice was not soothing like the lady’s had been, but it did assure me that he was now in control of the situation and that in itself was a comfort. “You know perfectly well your parents are in Switzerland, Tony. You’re going to be fine. The doctor is going to come and do a few tests on you, and you might have to spend the night here.” I started to whine—I didn’t like that idea. I wanted to go home, even if my parents _weren’t_ there. “Hush, Tony,” Obadiah told me, glancing around the crowded hospital hallway. His hands were tucked firmly in the pockets of his overcoat. I reached out and grabbed the dark fabric when he started to move away. “Hey! Tony, let go, you’re getting dirt on me.” I stubbornly refused. “I need to talk to the doctor, Tony. But Dominic will stay right here with you.”

“I don’t like Dominic,” I pouted, as Obadiah’s thin-faced assistant approached. “He smells like old cheese!”

Obadiah rolled his eyes and left. He wasn’t too far away, though, just over at the nurses’ station demanding to talk to Dr. Stevenson and asking if people knew who I was. Which was just silly—it wasn’t like _he_ didn’t know who I was. He had always been around, as long as I could remember. Meanwhile, Dominic stood over me with a sour expression—clearly he wished he could be doing anything _other_ than this. I kicked at him every time he came too close.

“My tummy hurts,” I announced suddenly. “And my head hurts.” I realized that Obadiah was correct—my parents _were_ in Switzerland, which was quite far away—so it wouldn’t do much good to call for Mommy again. When it came to dealing with discomfort, though, I really didn’t know what else to do. “Where’s Nanny Angela?” Not that I liked _her_ very much, either.

“Um, I don’t know,” Dominic answered uncomfortably. He didn’t seem to know what to do with himself any more than I did, but I didn’t care—he was the grown-up and I was just a kid.

“My tummy hurts,” I repeated, with a more pathetic whining tone. “I don’t feel good!”

“Uh, well, maybe if you just lie still—“ Dominic tried.

But that was, of course, impossible. Not just because I was _me_. But also because I was about to throw up—all over Dominic. I started crying, because I didn’t like throwing up. Throwing up made me feel like such a failure, like something else had taken control of my body. Plus it meant something was Really Wrong, didn’t it? Mommy always said I could stay home from school if I threw up.

I thought I heard Dominic saying some bad words and then Obadiah was talking again. But I figured I didn’t have to pay attention to him, because I was sick. And then I must have fallen asleep.

**

The next day I was in my room in the hospital, quite bored. The nurse said I was special so I got my own room, but it was very quiet and there was no one to talk to—the nurse had been _very firm_ when she said I wasn’t to push the call button anymore unless I really needed something. The TV showed cartoons, but those didn’t keep me occupied for very long. At least someone had brought my notepad and some crayons, so I could work on my drawings.

Finally the door opened to admit not another doctor or nurse but rather Obadiah. “Obie!” I greeted excitedly. “Are you going to take me home now? When are Mommy and Daddy coming?” Nobody at this stupid hospital seemed to be able to answer my questions.

He sat down in a chair beside the bed. “No, I think you’d better stay here another night, Tony,” he replied, disappointing me greatly.

“I don’t like it here,” I declared. “It’s boring! I want to go home. When are Mommy and Daddy coming?”

“They’re in Switzerland, Tony,” Obadiah repeated patiently. “They aren’t coming back.”

“Ever?” I asked, suddenly afraid.

“No, no, they’ll be back next week,” he corrected. “Just like it says on your calendar at home.”

“Oh. But, if they aren’t coming back to see me,” I reasoned, “then I must not be very sick. But if I’m not very sick, why can’t I go home now?”

“You’re not _sick_ at all,” Obadiah began. “You’re _injured_. Though you wouldn’t know it from your behavior. Is it possible you could sit still, Tony, instead of crawling all over the bed like a deranged monkey?”

I paused momentarily, sitting back on my heels on the bed. Sitting still was boring, so… “No, I don’t think so.”

“Well at least you gave it a try,” Obadiah said dryly. “Now, look, I want to talk to you, Tony.”

“We _are_ talking,” I pointed out. “Although you haven’t answered my question yet.”

“You’re a very clever little boy,” he observed, sounding like he didn’t entirely approve.

“I know,” I agreed matter-of-factly. I would hardly be in the class with the big kids if I _weren’t_ clever, would I?

“So why would such a clever boy be up on the roof of the school, when he wasn’t supposed to be?” Obadiah asked pointedly. “Not mention whatever stupid thing you were doing that caused you to fall _off_.”

“I didn’t _fall_ off the roof,” I corrected. “I jumped!” His eyebrows went up. “I thought I was going to fly,” I explained. “But I must have calculated something wrong.”

“I’ll say,” Obadiah replied. “Tony, did you honestly think you were going to _fly_? Whatever gave you _that_ idiotic idea?”

“It’s not _idiotic_!” I protested hotly. That surely had something to do with being an _idiot_ , who was someone who was dumb. Which I wasn’t. “I just need to make some changes to my wings, that’s all. Did anyone save my wings?” I asked hopefully. “They were probably on the ground behind the school…”

“Yeah, along with _you_ ,” Obadiah said with irritation. “What do you mean, _wings_?”

I dragged over my notepad and flipped to the correct page, where I had drawn what I considered to be detailed blueprints for a one-man (-boy?) flying accessory set—carefully-designed wings that strapped onto the arms, legs, and feet to keep a person aloft with the proper updraft. “I think I need to make this part more bendy,” I decided, “and this part longer. Also, I’m not really sure how to figure out the windspeed. Maybe it’s not windy enough at school.”

Obadiah was looking at the drawings very carefully, which was gratifying. No one else really seemed all that interested in them. “Did you do this math yourself?” he asked, looking at the numbers at the bottom of the page.

“Of course! I’m very good at math.”

“Not so much spelling, though,” he commented dryly. He pulled a pen from his pocket and wrote neatly beneath my crayon printing. “ _That’s_ how you spell ‘equation’ and ‘flight.’”

“I can’t read that,” I scoffed. He frowned. “You’re using loopy writing. I can’t read _loopy_ writing.” Obadiah patiently rewrote the words, this time printing. “Oh, there’s a ‘q’ in that word? That’s just dumb.”

“Also notice where the ‘g’ and ‘h’ go in ‘flight,’” he suggested.

“Well, I knew they were _there_ , at least,” I pointed out.

“Very true.” He went back to the drawings. “So you… _made_ these wings? Where?”

“Art class.” They had taken a long time, too. But the groundskeeper had probably picked them up as trash by now. “I think I could improve what they’re made of, too. I’d like metal, like Daddy uses. Maybe some canvas. I think the construction paper and popsicle sticks weren’t strong enough,” I assessed. “But I’m not allowed to use the pointy scissors, so I don’t have as much choice. But,” I added eagerly, “if I had some _help_ , the Kevin III would work perfectly, I’m sure.”

“Kevin?” Obadiah asked. He looked like he had a lot of questions, actually, which I was happy to answer if they were about my design. “What’s Kevin?”

“That’s what I call my wing set,” I explained. “See, Daddy calls the first plane Mark I, and then when he makes it a lot better he calls it Mark II. But I like ‘Kevin’ better than ‘Mark.’ There’s a boy named Mark in my class and he’s really mean, so I didn’t want to name anything after him.”

“Right, well, that makes sense,” Obadiah agreed, though I suspected he was being sarcastic. “So the next one would be, er, _Kevin_ III. What happened to Kevin I?”

“Not sure. Jorge might have taken it.”

“Who’s Jorge?”

“The pool guy,” I told him. “He’s really funny, he tells lots of jokes. Wanna hear one?” I told him a very funny joke in Spanish and flopped over on the bed laughing. “Isn’t that funny? You’re not laughing. Don’t you get it?”

“I _do_ get it, as it happens,” Obadiah replied, “because I speak Spanish. But _you_ don’t.”

“Get the joke?”

“Speak Spanish, Tony. You don’t speak Spanish.”

“Yes, I do.” I demonstrated this by rattling off several lines of dialogue from the telenovela Nanny Angela liked to watch in the afternoons. I didn’t really understand them, but that wasn’t because they were in Spanish—it was because they didn’t sound like things normal people said. Then again, the characters on the show were really pretty weird, so maybe it all made sense to _them_.

“I thought you were taking German in school,” Obadiah said.

“I am. Daddy says German is an important business language.”

“Maybe you should try Japanese,” he suggested, which sounded kind of fun. I already watched a lot of cartoons from Japan. Then Obadiah shook his head. “Let’s get back to the point, Tony. Why do you think Jorge the pool guy took your first set of wings?”

“Well, probably when he saw them floating in the pool, he thought they were trash and scooped them out,” I decided. “I expect the paper napkins and bendy straws didn’t hold up for long in the water.”

“And they got in the water…?”

“When I fell in the pool after jumping off the roof at the back of the house.”

Obadiah nodded, which I hoped meant he was finally seeing my logic. He would be the first. “Look, Tony,” he said after a moment, “this is a very good design. But you need to find a safer way to test it. You can’t keep jumping off roofs. Especially when there isn’t a pool underneath you. Do you understand me?”

I shook my head. “No. How else would I test them? Get someone _else_ to jump off the roof? Hmm, I could probably get Timmy Fredericks to do it, he’s pretty dumb. He shoved a rock up his nose last week and it got stuck there! It was _so funny_!”

“No, no, no,” Obadiah countered. “The first thing is—Well, look,” he proposed, “I’ll help you figure this out. We’ll even see about getting some proper materials for you to work with.”

“Whoo-hoo!”

He winced slightly at my volume. “But no more jumping off of roofs, Tony. Or anything else, for that matter. Or getting anyone else to do it, okay?”

“Well, okay,” I agreed reluctantly. “But you really have to help me, Obie! Sometimes Daddy says he’s going to help me and then he gets busy.”

“Well, your daddy has a lot to do,” Obadiah excused.

“I know. He has to protect us from the bad guys,” I nodded. “But I can’t wait around forever! I have to get to work on the Kevin III.”

“I think you’ve got a _little_ time, Tony,” he tried to tell me. “Couldn’t you just, you know, _play_? With blocks or whatever?”

I shook my head soberly. “Mommy says I’ll have plenty of time to play when I’m older. But I should work now while I’m _inspired_. Probably when I’m really old, like twenty, I’ll be all out of ideas, and then I’ll just play all the time.”

I couldn’t tell if Obadiah thought this was a good plan or not. “I wish I could fast-forward fifteen or twenty years,” he decided. “You’re going to be quite a handful.”

Well, I didn’t know what _that_ was supposed to mean. “So you’re gonna help me?” I persisted.

“Yes, I promise.” He closed the notepad and set it aside.

The silence seemed awkward. “So… let’s get started now,” I suggested hopefully. “We could go home and work on it.”

“Tony, you have a concussion,” Obadiah pointed out. “Do you know what that means?” I shook my head. “That means when you rather foolishly jumped off that roof yesterday, you hit your head on the ground. You’re lucky you didn’t break anything. Like your neck.”

“The wings helped,” I decided thoughtfully.

“The doctor ran some tests on you and you seem to be fine,” he went on, “but since your parents aren’t home, it might be better if you spent one more night in here.”

I didn’t like that idea at all. “Oh, but I don’t want to! It’s so boring and it’s too quiet and there are funny smells! Can’t I go home with _you_?”

He looked quite startled for a moment. “Me? Oh no, I don’t think so.”

“Why not? Your house is really neat! There’s lots of stuff to look at.” Which reminded me. “I promise I’ll try not to break anything this time.”

“Oh? Were you trying _to_ break things before?” This confused me. “Never mind. Er, look, Tony, maybe I could talk to your nanny and see if she’s comfortable keeping an eye on you all night—“

I grimaced heartily at this idea. “I don’t like Nanny Angela! I think she’s trying to poison me. She makes me eat oatmeal!”

“You’re a little young for paranoia, Tony,” Obadiah commented. “On the other hand, she _did_ bring you Superman pajamas after you jumped off a roof thinking you could fly, so you may have a point.”

I missed most of that between ‘Superman pajamas’ and ‘you may have a point,’ since I was thinking about the Superman pajamas I still had on, but those seemed to be the only important parts anyway. “So we agree. Let’s go!”

“Hold on, champ,” Obadiah countered, catching me and setting me back on the bed. “I need to clear it with your folks first.”

“Okay, I’ll fax them,” I announced.

“You’ll what?”

“Mommy and Daddy always give me the fax number for their hotel,” I explained, “so I can use the fax in Daddy’s office to talk to them. I send them notes and drawings and school papers all the time! I even sent my Kevin plans Monday. So we’ll go home and just fax them.”

He still looked confused. “But the hotel in Zurich doesn’t have a—Never mind,” he decided suddenly. “I’ll just call, that way I can get their answer right away.”

“Yes, it does take a while for them to answer me,” I agreed. “Faxes can be very unreliable, I guess.”

“Yes, they can. Well why don’t you get dressed,” he suggested, “and I’ll go call them right now?”

“Okay. Thanks, Obie!”

* * *


End file.
